The Napster Story with Jordan Ritter

Summary

If you know the Napster story at all, then you know about the Shawn(Sean)s. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. But in my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of other people, a name that you should be just as familiar with is Jordan Ritter. Napster was an incredible phenomenon, reaching tens of millions of users at its height, and though Jordan Ritter didn’t invent Napster, he very much was responsible for scaling it and turning it into the phenomenon it became. In today’s episode, Jordan recounts the entire Napster story, from it’s gestation in the w00w00 hacker collective (which, by the way, people talk a lot about the PayPal mafia, but an argument can be made for a w00w00 mafia) all the way through Napster’s legal descent into oblivion. You might know Jordan as the cofounder of Cloudmark and Servio, and at the end of the episode, he talks about the big problems he’s working to solve today.

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About the AuthorBrian McCullough

Brian McCullough has been in the Internet game since 1998. He was the founder or co-founder of the following companies: WhereAreTheJobs.com, WhoToTalkTo.com and ResumeWriters.com. He was named to a 2016 TED Residency.
A book loosely based on these podcasts will be coming out in Spring 2018. It is currently titled HOW THE INTERNET HAPPENED, and will be published by Liveright, a subsidiary of W.W. Norton.
He is an Arsenal fan; Gator fan; England fan. In that order. In 2014 he was the co-founder of a startup human named Penelope, and in 2016 he launched Maxwell into beta.